The controversy over the alleged solicitation of a $1 million bribe for a Mexican government contract now has moved into the British courts, where a former IBM representative and a former Cabinet minister accuse each other of slander. The case has proven highly embarrassing for the Mexican government, which has worked hard to eliminate even the appearance of official corruption in recent years.

The stormy skies of central Florida gave up without a fight today, allowing the space shuttle Discovery to blast off on a mission that could lead to better communications for some of the world's more impoverished areas. "We're trucking along," the crew told Mission Control in Houston 90 minutes after the Discovery reached its orbit 220 miles above the earth.

With long-distance telephone service to Mexico City knocked out by last week's earthquake, officials at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles were unable to offer any relief to the hundreds of callers anxiously seeking word about their relatives in the devastated capital. "It was a very pathetic situation," said Federico Chavez, a member of the consulate's task force on communications.

The U.S. asked the World Trade Organization to force Mexico to open its telecommunications industry to foreign competition or face trade sanctions, raising the stakes in a two-year dispute over the $12-billion market. "Mexico's market remains dominated by a single company with a government mandate to set high wholesale prices," U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said. The complaint to the WTO, a Geneva-based body that sets the rules for trade, boosts Avantel, part-owned by WorldCom Inc.

A former Mexican prosecutor who was the chief federal law enforcement authority in Tijuana when presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated there was gunned down Wednesday during a morning jog around a track in the Mexican border city.

Federal regulators have taken the boldest step yet to pry open Mexico's fixed-line telephone market to competition and loosen the grip of telecom giant Telmex, which has long enjoyed a near monopoly here. An official with Mexico's Communications and Transportation Secretariat said Tuesday that the agency would craft regulations that would allow cable television companies to jump into the $12-billion market, perhaps as soon as December.

The space shuttle Atlantis is set to light the night sky in a spectacular liftoff from Kennedy Space Center this evening, at the beginning of a seven-day mission to launch three satellites and to test construction methods in space. The launching, scheduled for 7:29 p.m. EST, is only the second at night in the history of the space program.

With the economic policies of President Miguel de la Madrid in sudden disarray, Mexican citizens are beginning to contemplate what appears to be a chronic streak of failed presidencies. Although 11 months remain in De la Madrid's six-year term, economic upheavals and unusually harsh criticism of his government have led many observers to conclude that De la Madrid's term will be judged a flop, the third one in a span of 18 years.

New Mexico State ended a week of seemingly botched public relations and gratuitous statements quietly Monday. If only the Aggies would have acted similarly from the unfortunate beginning. Closure came for New Mexico State and the Big West Conference in a two-page statement released by the conference office.